| Life and Remembrance in Honor of Memorial Day | ||||||||||
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Frostiana: Seven Country Songs Composer and educator Randall Thompson belongs to a large group of mid-twentieth century American composers – including Howard Hanson, Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland, to name a few – who were the last group of American composers trained in the European late-romantic tonal tradition. Their mission was to establish an “American” style, drawing upon American folk idioms, themes and texts. Despite the appeal of Copland’s now-iconic classic American sound, the group was sidelined after World War II by the academic dominance of serialism in American classical music. They have been resurrected with the return to more eclectic, and even tonal, environment of contemporary music. Thompson taught at Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkley, the Curtis Institute, the University of Virginia, Princeton, and finally, after 1948, Harvard. He is best remembered as a composer of rousing, melodious choral music, turned out on an abundance of commissions. For its bicentennial celebration in 1959, the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, commissioned Thompson to write a choral work with texts by Robert Frost, the quintessential New England poet. Frost, who knew and admired the composer, agreed, but Thompson insisted on selecting the poems himself. Thompson’s original score was for mixed chorus and piano; in 1965 he arranged a version with chamber orchestra. Frost was present at the premiere and shouted “Sing that again!” at the conclusion of the piece. Thompson matched Frost’s direct language with appropriately accessible music, taking great care to ensure that the words of Frost’s poems were clearly discernable and adapting the music to the mood of each poem so that there is no single musical style that characterizes Frostiana as a whole. The settings range from strophic folksongs (“Road Not Taken” and “A Girl’s Garden”) to more harmonically complex, through-composed pieces such as “Come In” – which features an elaborate flute solo imitating a thrush – and the elegiac “Choose Something Like a Star.” Only three of the songs are for mixed chorus: The opening “Road Not Taken;” “A Telephone” (a dialogue between the men and women); and “Choose Something Like a Star,” which concludes the set. “Pasture” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are for men, “Come In” and the only comic piece in the set, “A Girl’s Garden,” for women. 1. “Road Not Taken” | ||||||||||
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Requiem John Rutter, one of Britain’s most popular contemporary composers, specializes in choral music, but has also written two children's operas, several orchestral works and music based on the heritage of the Beatles. In 1981 he founded the Cambridge Singers and led them to international prominence. As a composer whose works are accessible to singers and audiences alike, Rutter’s compositions have been performed extensively both here and in Europe. He states that his work "…ranges in difficulty from very simple to fairly challenging, though it was my intention in writing them that none would be beyond the reach of a capable church choir." The Requiem premiered in 1985 for the United Methodist Church in Dallas TX. Rutter composed it in response to a personal bereavement, comparing it to the Requiems of Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé. It also bears a relationship to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, which it resembles chiefly in its use of English texts, including Psalms 23 and 130 and fragments of the Anglican burial service from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Although Psalm 23 constitutes a separate movement, the other English texts are woven into the Latin of the Catholic Requiem Mass. While Rutter characterizes his Requiem as a concert piece rather than a liturgical one, he says he hopes "it feels at home in church." Requiem comes from the Latin word for rest. But the focal point of most of the great requiem masses since Mozart has been the Dies irae (day of wrath), the poem describing the terrors of the Last Judgment. Gabriel Fauré was the first composer to recast the requiem as a source of solace for both the soul of the deceased and the mourner, and Rutter’s work is definitely within this spirit. Unconstrained by the grim liturgical requirements of the Catholic Mass for the Dead, he completely omits any reference to the final judgment, choosing rather as the centerpiece of his work the Sanctus in praise of God. It is the most spirited movement, whose harmony and tempo in imitation of celebratory English church bells produce an atmosphere of comfort in the midst of grief. Even the Agnus Dei with its chromatic chant and dirge-like timpani accompaniment concludes on a note of hope of eternal salvation. The Requiem begins with a dirge on the words “Requiem aeternam,” accompanied by timpani and harp.  But on the word “Lux aeterna” (Light eternal) the music suddenly brightens and warms. Rutter then begins the text again, this time with a gentle theme, almost a lullaby. A cello solo opens the second movement, “Out of the deep.” The melodic line recalls American slave spirituals. the vocal range gradually ascending as a symbol of the text. The “Pie Jesu” features the clear treble of a child soprano, who sings responsorially with the chorus. The ethereal sound of the children’s voices that opens the Sanctus gives the impression of an angelic choir singing the praises of God and is imitated by the adult chorus.The Agnus Dei returns to the dirge of the opening movement and is the most somber and intense movement of the Requiem. The text alternates between an increasingly fervent Latin refrain (“Agnus Dei”) and English, which serves as a kind of gloss or commentary on the prayer to the Lamb of God. & . A solo flute introduces the words, “I am the resurrection and the light,” and the music brightens from the dense chromatic harmony into a clear major mode. Psalm 23 begins the release from grieving and is introduced by a lovely oboe solo. The music supports the text, beginning with a simple alternation between the women and men each singing in unison. Rutter casts a musical shadow with slightly dark harmonic color at, “yea, though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” Despite the threat of hellfire, the liturgical Catholic Requiem Mass begins and closes with the same invocation, a prayer for the eternal rest of the deceased in God’s light. Rutter opens the final movement, “Lux aeterna,” with a soprano solo in English (“I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me”) (ex 13), echoed by the chorus. Rutter concludes his Requiem by repeating the lilting “Requiem aeternam” melody from the first movement. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis. Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem: exaudi orationem meam, ad te omnis caro veniet. Kyrie, eleison! Christe, eleison! Kyrie, eleison! | ||||||||||
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Symphony in C major Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the opera Carmen. Although he did not come from a family of professional musicians, Bizet’s parents recognized his talent and supported his ambition to become a composer. Encouraged by his father, he entered the Paris Conservatory at the extremely young age of ten. There, he excelled to the point of winning the coveted Prix de Rome, a composition prize that allowed the winners to study abroad for three years. At age 17, during his final year at the Paris Conservatoire, Bizet wrote the Symphony in C, a youthful masterpiece that was not published – and probably never performed – during his lifetime. Perhaps its resemblance to the Symphony No.1 by Charles Gounod, which Bizet had transcribed for piano, deterred him from making it public. The manuscript lay uncataloged for over 60 years among his papers at the Paris Conservatory. It was eventually brought to the attention of famed conductor Felix Weingartner, who finally premiered it in Basle in 1935. Bizet’s youth shows in the Symphony’s wealth of wonderful melodies but in a relatively unsophisticated sense for harmonic development. The work gives an overall impression of youthful energy – excluding the second movement, which is achingly romantic. There is a Schubertian quality about it, both in Bizet’s tendency to spin out melodies and to repeat the material in new keys. The opening movement is an energetic Allegro, classical in form but using thematic material more characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century. The two principal themes represent a contrast in melodic texture: the first is angular fanfare-like melody of broken chords, the second a smooth legato for the violins. The second movement is an oboist’s dream – and nightmare. In performance it’s one of the repertory’s great licks. But its long, sinuous theme often shows up on orchestral auditions to test if the first and second oboes create the kind of blend that will make them virtually indistinguishable from each other. While two oboists share the long phrase, it should sound as if only one has been playing. A subsidiary theme begins like a cadence to the first theme but then shapes itself into a separate melody. It’s possible that the little fugato based on the rhythm of the oboe theme was an academic requirement. Composition teachers regarded the fugue as the highest form of classical counterpoint, and most of the great symphonies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sported at least one fugato passage.The third movement, a lively scherzo, opens almost like a fanfare in 3/4 time followed by a contrasting whirling theme in the violins. Oddly, the trio is based on the same theme but transformed and re-orchestrated into a country dance accompanied by faux bagpipes. The long finale begins with a quiet chattering theme in the violins and flutes but breaks into another fanfare-like melody ; these two themes plus a third reminiscent of the second strain of the scherzo are repeated in various permutations but not truly developed in the classical sense. Bizet picked up a little trick from Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in weaving his initial theme into final cadence of the piece. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2010 | ||||||||||
